RFID: January 1 Doesn't Matter, Says ABI Research. 2005 Does.
Much has been made of the looming January 1, 2005 "deadline" for RFID implementation by Wal-Mart's top 100 suppliers. Headlines have broadcast analysts' conclusion that the majority of them simply won't get there in time.
But, says Erik Michielsen, ABI Research's director of RFID and ubiquitous technologies, the fact that only around 30% of the Wal-Mart's top 100 suppliers will have done full-scale RFID implementations by January 1 isn't the issue.
What's really important, he believes, is what the lagging 70% -- who have just been testing the waters with shallow "slap-and-ship" efforts -- will do over the course of the coming year, and why they have been so halfhearted in their compliance efforts so far.
"Wal-Mart didn't expect this battle to be won by January first, 2005," says Michielsen. "What it did was create an incentive structure that pushed its partners in the market to better understand the technology while standards were being developed and innovation was taking place. Wal-Mart's goal is to get companies to integrate this technology into their changing business processes."
Some of these companies have said that they can't afford integration trials. "I don't think that's the real reason," Michielsen observes. "The truth is that there haven't been reputable integrators in the market. Only now are we seeing Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft getting involved at the product and personnel level."
If the theme for 2004 was standards, fundamentals and education, the next phase will be a transition to integration services involving middleware and infrastructure. 2005 will become "the year of the integrator."
ABI Research's study, "RFID Integration Services Markets" includes models for RFID verticals and applications, with focus on RFID reader integration services, RFID middleware integration services, and RFID systems integration services.
Source: press release
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